Hellcats Read Free Page B

patrol areas—including, perhaps, even the forbidden Sea of Japan, which, after the earlier penetrations, was now thought to be guarded by newer and even bigger minefields designed specifically to keep submarines out. Lockwood realized that the new system, called FM sonar (FMS), if fully developed, would give submarines a powerful offensive tool.
    FM sonar evolved into that tool at about the same time hard-won victories in the Pacific suggested Japan might be nearing collapse. It seemed possible, then, that as ever more successful U.S. amphibious and surface naval operations gained momentum against Japan’s army and navy, and while U.S. submarines with better-performing torpedoes sank more and more merchant ships, a timely raid by subs into the Sea of Japan to attack protected shipping might speed up Japan’s collapse by cutting off supplies, which would demoralize her people and her leaders, who would then surrender.
    ComSubPac assumed that such a raid would accomplish several things. First, it would demonstrate that by penetrating the minefields ringing the Sea of Japan, U.S. subs could operate virtually anywhere and under any conditions. Second, it would demonstrate that the Japanese were utterly defenseless against U.S. military forces. Third, besides cutting off vital war supplies, it would slow if not end the transfer of troops from Manchuria to Kyushu to meet the anticipated U.S. invasion of Japan. Fourth, it would demonstrate to the Soviet Union that the United States Navy’s powerful submarine force would play a vital role in the implementation of America’s strategic objectives in the postwar era.
    As Admiral Lockwood surveyed developments in the sonar laboratories in California, he quickly grasped the tactical implications that the new device had unexpectedly presented. He wasted no time putting them to use. Thus were born the Hellcats and Operation Barney.

PART ONE
    The Beginning of the End

CHAPTER ONE
    A World Destroyed
    T he brick apartment building at 18 Collier Road, Atlanta, Georgia, still stands. Today it’s in demand for its proximity to Midtown and Buckhead, and, across the street, a major medical facility, Piedmont Hospital. In July 1945 it was home to Sarah Simms Edge and her daughter, Sarah, age three.
    With a second child due in August, Sarah, likely dreading another scorcher of a July day in Atlanta, went about her daily routine of household chores and caring for little Sarah. She was looking forward to the mail, anticipating a letter from her husband, U.S. Navy commander Lawrence Lott Edge. Since his deployment to the Pacific, Edge, commanding officer of the USS Bonefish , had written with such clocklike regularity that despite the great physical distance separating them, Sarah felt as close to her husband as was possible in wartime.
    Sarah had last been with Lawrence in San Francisco, where the Bonefish , upon her return from the Pacific in early November 1944, had undergone a major overhaul at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Typically, Pacific Fleet subs underwent three- to four-month-long overhauls on the West Coast, either at Hunters Point or Mare Island Naval Shipyard. It had been a wonderful and long-anticipated reunion for the couple. Romantic, too, for Sarah soon discovered that she was pregnant.
    After the Bonefish completed her overhaul in mid-February, she had sailed for Pearl Harbor. From Pearl Harbor she departed for Guam, arriving on Easter Sunday, April 1. Far to the northwest, in the Ryukyu Islands, American troops were landing on Okinawa, Japan’s last Pacific bastion. Only 956 miles from Tokyo, the capture of Okinawa would give the United States a forward staging area from which to launch Operation Majestic, the proposed invasion of Japan, should it become necessary.
    As the fight for Okinawa gained momentum, the Bonefish departed Guam on her seventh war patrol, Lawrence’s third as CO. In addition to a regular combat patrol, he had orders to conduct a